ration card. before the Americans came over and won the war for us we had to live on little cubes of food and had to produce the card at the grocers to get them and the country got so thin we nearly went down the plughole

greaseproof sheets.what ladies used to shove down their Knickers as they worked in bomb making factories in order to keep out the cold (this was long before the days of global warming)

mothballs-what everyone stank of when they got their two shilling suit out from the back of the wardrobe for weddings and funerals

Larry Lark -a right old bastard who likes to pretend he was a kid dodging bombs and clips round the ear during the war.

Humbug-a large minty flavoured black and white sweet which when sucked for three whole days removes the cavities from your teeth

your syllable count is up and i'd suggest a low fat diet of strict 7-beat lines for a poem like this -- i think the ramble on to 9's empowers you to make 'irony', when, really, the world wasn't paying attention anyway.

when i was a kid, here in the states, in '49, the margarine came in a gray lump and there was a capsule of yellow die you'd open and mix with the vegetable lard. that in itself is kind of innovative. i was reading this french kids story last night, from a series, and the author's have one character who's evidently the resident hearth-diety of food, asking, when a kid said his dad had cooked dinner and all they had was frozen peas and a tin of sardines, and this Alceste says, "umm, that is good, 'peas and sardines'?" — trashpoodle

I am so obvious crimsonkiss that i look and sound all the time.....well, just like Larry — larrylark

I do so look forward to your X rating TP, TP=Top Boy, and i print them off and take them down my local where Stan and Harold rub their hands with glee at the thought of reading such low class entertainment on a par with the righteous pomposity one skims through in The Sunday Times Review section. The account of your childhood would be marginally interesting except that you have played your usual hand of buttering it up. Please send more as a long rainy and consequently tedious summer lies inevitably ahead here in cloudy North Lancashire where to spot the sun is a task frought with difficulty.

gee, larry, why do you sound all raspy? and... the margarine, lucky-lark, was to hint that your experience was so whiny that it made me want to think of how people actually get socially aware and inventive under group duress. if it was really about you, then you can use the margarine for hair cream.

sorry this couldn't be the wonderful 1950's poem about the 1940's for me, but i'm waiting for the next bigh one just to be sure i don't make a mistake about the last big one.

I sound raspy? You obviously have no idea off the effect of your patronising and condescending tone. You should buy some butter and put it where you need to. Wanna buy a ration card? You sem to be a trifle short of a jelly

if you hear it that way, then maybe that's what makes your comment sound raspy. as for this verse, Alan Furst makes this material sound more 'poetic'. just because you wrote it down doesn't mean anything. and, what i write as a comment is only supposed to be an introduction to a crit, with the author doing the crit on the poem too, and not on me.

PS i think the title trash poodle so apt for describing one who i imagine to be tippy tripping lightly theough rubbish such as mine giving off little yelps and wuffs. Actually you are of great assistance to me in my personal quest to accumulate 1 billion replies by Christmas 2014, a worthy is somewhat pointless exercise, a bit like life itself — larrylark

i've often wondered what exactly you were doing here, and i suppose you're finding that out for yourself by posing this question set and answer. if you'd like to do something out of the ordinary, why not rewrite this using only 7 syllables per line? the discipline would be revelatory, and i think you'd find the words to make this work much more effectively -- as though you were pre-organizing the material for the reader so that there'd be no ambiguity -- no lost mood or moments, where you drifted off into self-indulgence and lost the poem. — trashpoodle

I simply don't know why your here or what exactly you are doing Top Boy. I suppose you are finding nothing out about yourself by posing with your diamented collar and puffs of flea powder. You are the bitch next door who keeps on yapping and passes time between Bonoi's sniffing in the borders of the garden for the world you lost drifting through all those lost moods and moments in between cocking your leg against the begonia's while you sift through the self indulgence of ypurbitch crits. Now where have i heard that before.